Salsify raises $8M to help e-retailers control data about their products

Salsify has raised $8 million for its cloud-based solution that helps businesses manage the content about their products.

Every product has data associated with it. Salsify’s tools helps manufactures, distributors, and retailers input the data and track it as the product circulates around the Web. It includes tools for collaborative workflow across multiple organizations, so retailers “downstream” can also make edits.

For example, if you are selling face cream, you use Salsify to enter images, ingredients, price, a description, cross-sells, etc. This information follows the product as it gets listed on Amazon, eBay, or any other retail site. It can be updated and customized depending on the retailer.

“Companies with big enough budgets to even start thinking about addressing product content management typically spend six-to-seven figures per year on an enterprise software solution that cannot keep up with the pace of change in the marketplace, and don’t even try to address the problem of easily sharing content between organizations,” said Jason Purcell, cofounder and CEO of Salsify in a statement. “We’re taking a very different, decentralized approach that makes managing product content exponentially easier and faster and, for the first time, collaborative across the supply chain, so that anyone who sells online can benefit.”

Purcell and his cofounders observed a trend towards decentralization in online retail where products are sold across a wide and often fragmented range of channels. Companies were struggling to keep up with how fast their products moved and how frequently their data needed to be updated accordingly. Salsify aims to bring the decentralized collaboration of popular services like Yammer and Github to e-commerce.

“Salsify embraces the lessons of open source development, letting users branch, pull, annotate, fork, and edit product content within and across organizations,” the company says on its web site.

The company claims the system is easy enough that anyone can use it (even those who are not technical) and that all products are easily searchable within the system.

Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners led this first round of funding. Salsify is based in Boston.